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So the biggest fallout from the last presidential debate of 2012 might be the most awesome MC diss made by head of state to an opposing candidate. Followed by the best commander-in-chief mansplaining I’ve ever seen in the history of evers:

Perhaps Ann’s round up of responses best captures our collective reactions to the tit for tat between Romney and Obama in this last face off as we head into the final stretch of the forever presidential race.

But if you missed the 90 minute foreign policy exchange I’d really encourage you to read the full transcript. There’s something sort of peaceful about it. There’s no noise, only a clarity that comes from reading answers straight from the horses mouth. The universe of undecided voters should read the transcripts to get the answers they seek rather than responding to the beauty pageant aspects of this horse race. Romney may sound reasonable, and as some have already noted, he’s passed the ‘plausibility test’. Yet, he is inscrutable as this 12-month campaign has demonstrated. He’ll say what he’ll need to say to get votes and our money to support him getting votes. Romney for his part seems to have a ninth grade understanding of foreign policy. His answers were high school grade I-just-read-the-CIA-fact-book and crib notes of briefing materials on these matters of enemies and allies, Russia and Tehran. This last presidential debate demonstrated that weakness and simplistic worldview.

Will any of it matter at the polls? I hope so. Not everyone has a deep understanding of the Arab Spring and Green Revolutions as some of us do. Of how the women in the Arab world are key to modernizing their nation in their own cultural context, to adapt democracy beyond the American invention. Let along the sensitivity of understanding that America’s policy toward the Arab world has to mature beyond such binaries of as good and evil. And how that real talk maturity might actually lead to security on our shores and beyond because we built relationships, infrastructure, and holy hell, even made some friends. Imagine.

SYREETA MCFADDEN is a Brooklyn based writer, photographer and adjunct professor of English. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches and Storyscape Journal. She is the managing editor of the online literary magazine, Union Station, and a co-curator of Poets in Unexpected Places. You can follow her on Twitter @reetamac.

Syreeta McFadden is a contributing opinion writer for The Guardian US and an editor of Union Station Magazine.

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